Melissa Branch, 38, of Newport Beach with her son Frasier, 5-months at Heller Park in Costa Mesa in Costa Mesa on Friday, July 14, 2017. Melissa and her husband waited to have children until she was in her mid-thirties.

Last year, the state reached a historic milestone: the lowest birth rate on record – 12.4 births per thousand people. That rate was 12.3 for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties and a Southern California News Group analysis of state projections shows the region’s rate could fall another 24 percent by 2040.

The pace of motherhood in California is slowing and its members are aging, a shift demographers expect to continue and contribute to far-reaching and uncertain changes in the decades to come.

Last year, the state reached a historic milestone: the lowest birth rate on record — 12.4 births per thousand people. That rate was 12.3 for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties and a Southern California News Group analysis of state projections shows the region’s rate could fall another 24 percent by 2040.

California outpaced the nation by another key measure: declining fertility rates in what is considered childbearing age for women by the National Center for Health Statistics: 15 to 44. According to provisional state data, California last year saw 60.5 births per thousand women, compared to an all-time low 62 births per thousand nationwide.

Other trends also point to the coming changes in California’s maternal future. Fertility rates among California women under 29 fell from 1990 to 2015, most sharply by 74 percent among teens 15 to 19, according to state Department of Finance data. In contrast, rates for women aged 35 to 39 and 40 to 44 rose 45 percent and 67 percent, respectively.

After graduating college and moving to Orange County, Melissa Branch, 38, of Newport Beach wasn’t sold on the idea of settling down and having kids. She wanted to live her own life; travel and focus on her career.

“When I was in my younger 20s, the only things I was hearing were high divorce rates, failed marriages,” she said. “I made sure I did everything I wanted to do first before settling down, because once you settle down and have a marriage, those choices are no longer yours.”

She could have a lot of company among new mothers in their 30s.

Looking ahead, state officials anticipate far fewer teen moms and, by 2040, higher rates of birth among women in their late 30s than women in their late 20s.

This switch isn’t apparent yet at MOMS Orange County, a pregnancy care center in Santa Ana, which collects data on its clients, at least 1,000 mothers a year.

The average age of mothers there over the past 10 years is actually down from 34 to 28, the center’s data showed, and the majority still are ages 19 to 35.

Biologically, it’s still best to have a child around age 20, and that’s not going to change, said Pamela Pimentel, a registered nurse and chief executive of the center. But generally, a mom at 35 is more stable emotionally and in her career than a mom in her late teens or early 20s.

However, “the older the mother is, the more risk there is” of complications during pregnancy that account for higher rates of death for older mothers, she said.

Branch falls in line with the trend of later motherhood. She and her husband, Kevin, 46, have a five-month old son, Frazier; they had their first son, Kevin, when Branch was 36.

Knowing the risks of becoming pregnant after age 35, Branch said she took extra steps to avoid complications.

“I went by the guidance of my doctor and everything that was recommended to us as far as the types of genetic testing that was available, and other types of screenings just to make sure the health of the baby — and myself — was well during the pregnancy,” Branch said.

“By the time I hit 35, we made a collective decision that we would try to have a baby, but we are very fortunate that we didn’t have the fertility struggles that some older women have, who turn to things like in vitro fertilization,” for help conceiving, she said.

Both Branch and her husband work full-time, so both children are in daycare full-time — the costs are “astronomical,” she said.

Births still more than replace deaths — factoring in immigration and longer lifespans, the four-county region is estimated to add 2.7 million people over the next two decades. But demographers warn the changing birth rate and population patterns may lead to a smaller workforce that will have to support more retirees, straining pension and health care systems.

The causes of the declining birth rates and delays in childbearing are both economic and a result of changing societal roles for women, who have more career and educational opportunities than in the past. Southern California’s cost of living also continues to outpace wages, and owning or renting a house to start a family now often requires two household earners.

If young workers can’t take time off work to raise kids, they’ll push parenthood back or rethink it altogether, said Dowell Myers, professor of urban planning urban planning and demography at USC. And because many women are starting families later, they also are having fewer kids over their reproductive life because “they have less time,” Myers said.

Myers, a leading expert on California’s changing population and its impacts, said he has been surprised that the economic recovery coming out of the Great Recession hasn’t led to an uptick in the birth rate. “It should be increasing, not decreasing,” he said.

The older generation depends on the success of younger generations, Myers noted. There’s a need to fill jobs left by retirees, as well as the need for young home buyers to meet the prices of older sellers, who have large shares of wealth in home equity.

A USC demographics study co-authored by Myers used a “senior ratio” — derived from a classic dependency ratio — to measure the pressure put on a workforce (25 to 64) to support retiree programs such as pensions, Social Security and Medicare.

In California, what had been 20.4 seniors per 100 working-age residents in 2000 could climb to 28.6 in 2020, then to 38.3 in 2030, burdening old-age programs, the study found.

“Orange County is the poster child in all of California for the aging problem,” Myers said. “It used to have low dependency ratios in the 1980s, when Orange County is a bastion for children with very few retirees.”

Orange County’s population has aged dramatically since then.

“It went from being younger than the rest of the state to being older than the rest of the state,” Myers said, and it now repels millennials because the cost of living is so high.

Riverside County, a retirement destination in the 1980s, has shifted the other way, becoming younger because of relative affordability, he said.

Cities’ and businesses’ goal should be attracting young workers, Myers said.

“The battle is for the millennials; they’re essential for paying (to) support the older people, so communities are fighting over them, trying to attract them,” Myers said.

But that’s something Southern California as a whole is failing to do, he said. “The out migration is like a revolving door … People come here, they try it on, they go back.”

In California, highly educated immigrants are filling holes left by young, native-born workers, especially the less educated, who leave for lower costs of living in other states.

“In an open population, (declining birth rates are) replaced by immigrants, who move to California to fill gaps in the workforce,” said Ethan Sharygin, a demographer at the California Department of Finance. A vast majority of immigrants are working age, 25 to 60, he said, and a future without them joining the labor pool “would be worrying,” he said.

Traditionally, California’s immigrant workforce was predominantly made up of Mexicans and other Latin Americans. Today, however, an influx of people from Asian countries such as China and India, either already college-educated or seeking a college education, come to fill high-paying jobs.

Reversing the birth rate trend is a difficult task, Myers said. Companies could pay higher wages and provide daycare to help households with working parents to attract and retain employees who’d like to start families, but the runaway Southern California housing market has made it difficult for everyone to keep up, he said.

Note: U.S. Census and California Department of Finance data differ slightly because of differences in methodology.

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